Some wines charm with rustic roots in an obscure and hilly corner of the world, farmed by humble folk. Some succeed by blank uniformity - bland grapes polished through technology to be acceptable, their provenance irrelevant.

Austria's reds fit into neither category, and hallelujah for that. Their origins are hardly backwaters - they're proximate to Vienna's urban bustle - and while tradition might reveal a rustic cellar or two, Austrian winemakers embrace every modern trapping.

These aren't offbeat bottles for the nerdy. The country's key red grapes - Zweigelt, Blaufrankisch and St. Laurent - can evoke the more familiar Pinot Noir, Zinfandel and the like. And they are accessible; 1-liter bottles of gulpable Zweigelt are easy to locate, priced barely above the equivalent of $10 per bottle. For $15 or $20, you can uncover a wine that might cost 50 percent more if grown elsewhere in the world.

So what's not to like?

If Austrian whites, notably the bulletproof Gruner Veltliner, have gained a certain fashion, the country's red wines are its great untold success story.

Success, asserts importer Terry Theise, has come as vintners have grown comfortable in their own skins. As Austria strived through the 1990s to return to respectability (more on that in a moment) its red winemaking endured a neurotic period of the same oak-obsessed, overwrought tinkering that has diminished much of the Old World.

"It's a story that I don't think could have been told 10 years ago," says Theise, who was instrumental in reviving Austria's fortunes on these shores, "because at that point you would have tasted a lot more pretentious wines, overreaching wines."

Pretense still lingers, but for the most part Austrian reds reveal their beauty unadorned.

Success is primarily found in those three key grapes. Blaufrankisch is the emerging star, as much a native as Austria has; its spice hints at Syrah, but at its best it echoes Burgundy's ethereal nature. St. Laurent, ironically, has been traced to Burgundy - hence comparisons to Pinot Noir - but it can present itself, favorably, as a spicy analog to Syrah. Zweigelt, a cross of the other two, can be either light or big-fisted, but it is constantly approachable.

Yet all three always contain something below the surface, a contrast of flavors found even in the simplest bottles.

"As cheerful as the wines are, they also have that European coolness," Theise suggests. "Though they're immensely attractive, they don't have that come-hither quality."

A different geography

This range of performance is why Austrian reds populate tables back home, where a straight-up liter is an expected sight. Just 293,000 liters of red were exported to the United States in 2009 - a fraction of 1.67 million liters exported overall, and barely a drop compared to 17 million liters of red sent across the border to Germany.

Even if you're familiar with Gruner Veltliner's geography, Austrian reds require a different understanding. Whites are primarily found in Niederosterreich, or Lower Austria, the country's northeastern quadrant. Areas rising north or west of Vienna and running along the Danube - Wachau, Kamptal, Kremstal - host top Gruner Veltliner and Riesling.

But reds are concentrated to the southeast of Vienna, mostly in the Burgenland region that straddles the Hungarian border - especially around the shores of the Neusiedlersee, one of central Europe's largest lakes. Though it helps make outstanding late-harvest sweet wines, the lake's warming influence also makes possible great red wine. That isn't to discount reds found in traditional white-wine areas, including fine examples from Ecker in the newly defined Wagram region. (See The Chronicle Recommends, elsewhere on this page.)

The country has twice as much land dedicated to white wine grapes, nearly 75,000 acres, but red acreage has edged up nearly 28 percent in a decade. It's particularly notable in Burgenland, where there's 41 percent more Zweigelt than 10 years ago.

"They had this great terroir and climate for making great red wines, so it was a natural next thing to do," says Emily Weissman, owner of import company Winemonger in Fairfax.

Weissman handles one of the best examples of this new, serious Burgenland red - the wines of Moric, made by Roland Velich. Velich's simple mission: to make Blaufrankisch-based wines near the Neusiedlersee as complex and vital as top Burgundies. Often he opens them next to top French wines, a la Robert Mondavi, to prove his point.

His approach is based not on fancy winemaking (his label insists his fruit "retains its own voice against dictates of fashion") but on harnessing top old-vine vineyards he's hunted down, namely the Neckenmarkt site on a mix of limestone, schist and other soils south of the Neusiedler lake.

To the north of the lake in Carnuntum, Dirk Niepoort and his former wife Dorli Muhr have taken a similar tack. Muhr, who runs a Vienna P.R. firm, inherited a parcel in the esteemed Spitzerberg site; Niepoort runs a historic Port house but has taken to making dry Portuguese reds. Spitzerberg reminded them of slopes in the Cote d'Or.

Blaufrankisch

In both cases, the winemakers see Blaufrankisch as an effective vehicle to express world-class terroir. Their wines make that case - sometimes dearly. While their lower-priced bottles deliver remarkable substance and spice, the world may not be ready to embrace $120 Blaufrankisch.

There's one final piece in this tale. To fully see the potential of Austrian reds, you must understand the second chapter of Austrian wine, which began after a 1985 scandal during which wine was found adulterated with diethylene glycol.

The so-called "antifreeze scandal" gave birth to Austrians' obsession with quality; that, plus a bit of a boost from a warmer climate and a new focus on exceptional vineyard work, has yielded the red wine bounty - one that, no surprise, is mostly being embraced by a young and exploratory crowd, some of whom weren't born during the dark depths of the glycol days.

As Weissman puts it: "We're going to convert very few French wine drinkers of a certain age. It's going to be people in their 30s and below, probably."

A shame, really, because the pleasure ratio of these wines on the table is incredibly high.

There are hurdles, of course, including the seeming American inability to embrace any label with German on it. But these wines make their case the moment you get them in the glass.

At a time when affordability is key, a country with a higher per-capita income than ours has made a case that red wine need not be fancy to be great. If that's Austria's lesson, here's to it.